A Study Of Appraisal Markers In C-E Consecutive Interpreting In Political Discourse

This thesis is based on Appraisal Theory put forward by Martin and White(2005).It is well acknowledged that Martin provides a practical and concrete mode for readers and listeners to fully understand and analyze the attitude,evaluation and stance of writers and speakers.In the context of politics,the speakers,always on behalf of their countries or top leaders will say something to express the stance and attitude towards some domestic and foreign policies,events and so on.What they say always imposes great influence on building national image,raising the voice of their countries and maintaining diplomatic relationship.So it is quite clear that interpreters play important role in the whole process.During the whole process of interpreting,in order to accurately deliver the meaning of the speaker,the interpreter must firstly understand the attitude and stance of the speaker,and then transform source language into target language while ensuring the stance and attitude of the speaker is not changed.The “Appraisal Theory” raised by Martin and White,includes three systems: attitude,engagement and graduation.There are further classifications under each kind of “appraisal” markers.The author of this paper adopts the text of Premier Li’s Press Conference in 2017 as the corpus.The author transcripts the source text and target text;then based on the classification standard of Martin,the author marks all the “appraisal” markers in source text and target text,puts them under different categories and counts the frequency of each kind of “appraisal” markers.Finally,the author analyzes the changes of the frequency of each kind of “appraisal” markers and tries to explore the effect which the interpreter will achieve with all these changes.After all the analysis,the author has some findings as follows: there are obvious changes in terms of the frequency of ‘engagement’ and ‘graduation’;the interpreter transforms the tone of ‘engagement’ from ‘more contraction to ‘more expansion’ and transforms a large number of ‘graduation’ from ‘down-scaling’ to ‘up-scaling’.This thesis may help to direct a new way to study interpreting of political discourse.